The Elderbrook Brothers

by Gerald Bullet

  That a betrothal was in prospect he could not, would not question. Ellen’s very positive refusal of him cut no ice. In his ingenuous reasoning her kisses made nonsense of her words. The battle was begun, and he was full of fight. She was everything: he was nothing. He was infinitely unworthy of her. That he could ever deserve her was out of the question; but that he must win her was obvious, since his very life depended on it.

  Neglectful in much else, the guardian angel that lived in his subconsciousness did mercifully curb his amorous fantasies. With quickening pulse he recalled the touch of her hands, the responsive pleasure of her lips; but his thoughts halted there, as upon the threshold of an inviolable sanctuary. Bridled by his young idealism, desire was stayed within the bounds of what an earlier generation had applauded as purity and a later one was to deride as repression. Resorting to neither vulgarity, Felix’s guardian angel, had he been articulate, would perhaps have called it, in the circumstances, common sense. But idealism and inexperience involved dangers as well as immunities. In the first wonder of a world transfigured Felix could not know that his bliss contained the seed of its own destruction; but he knew, soon enough, that where there had been a deep dazzling contentment, an all-sufficing delight, there was now a restlessness, a fever, a kind of fear. There was indeed such fear, half-secret from himself, as made it an agony that Ellen should ever be out of his sight.

  § 11

  FELIX said: ‘Aren’t we going to our tree today?’ And Ellen answered: ‘I thought we were going for a walk.’ The evasion shocked and dismayed him. Ever since parting from her he had hungered, body and soul, to take her into his arms again. The fallen tree on which they had sat two days ago had for both of them this special meaning. Yesterday he had seen her, but not alone; and yesterday’s famine made his present hunger intolerable. Already, though he would have indignantly denied it, the newly discovered intoxication of contact, so far as it went, was becoming an end in itself. Added to his heart’s worship was this clamorous need to touch and to kiss: only so, he argued, could he say things otherwise unsayable.

  They were already in the woods, but the path she seemed inclined to follow did not lead where he most wanted to go. The habit of pretending in public that she was no more than his friend was in danger of persisting even here. They walked together soberly, with something of constraint between them. Yet the constraint, he half-angrily felt, was on his side alone. She made no intimate sign, and her coolness made him feel clumsy, selfconscious. Seeing her so normal and undisturbed he could almost have believed that the day before yesterday had never happened or was forgotten; and he began to feel half-ashamed of his crude, unspoken desires. To quell that feeling, which he knew must be fatal to all his hopes if it persisted, he clutched at her hand, and halted.

  The hand was not withdrawn, but she did not immediately turn to him. He pulled her towards him and put his other hand on her shoulder. In dogged desperation, embarrassed by her neutrality, he moved to kiss her. She offered him her cheek and gave him a light kiss in return.

  He flushed painfully. They resumed their walk in silence, he struggling to make it appear that the episode had contented him.

  ‘I had a letter from home this morning,’ he said. ‘My mother’s ill.’

  ‘Is she, Felix? I’m so sorry.’

  ‘I expect I ought to go and see them.’

  ‘Yes. She’d like that. I hope it’s not anything serious?’

  ‘I’m afraid it is, rather. Unless my sister Nancy is exaggerating. It’d be quite like her.’

  ‘But you will go, won’t you?’

  Felix said in a flat tone: ‘Do you want me to go?’

  ‘Don’t be foolish.’ She spoke mildly, but he felt like a child rebuked. ‘I’m only thinking of her. You know that.’

  ‘I expect you think it’s funny of me not to have gone before, as soon as term ended.’

  ‘Not funny. Unusual perhaps. But I’d never given it a thought.’

  ‘I suppose not. Why should you?’ He seemed to take pleasure in turning the knife in his wound. But receiving no answer he presently said: ‘If I had, you and I might never have met.’

  ‘What a lot of trouble that would have saved you!’ said Ellen.

  He looked at her in sudden terror. ‘What do you mean?’

  She smiled. ‘Oh, nothing too dreadful.’ Her smile reassured him. ‘But I am being rather a trial to you. You can’t deny it.’

  Suddenly, without knowing what he intended, he seized and kissed her with passion. She murmured a protest, but his ardour melted her and her mouth grew kind under his. He kissed her again and again, as though he would never stop; but at that she resisted, disengaged herself, and broke away.

  Seeing him still unappeased she said quickly: ‘No, Felix. No more.’

  ‘Why not? I want …’

  ‘Dear Felix!’ She held him at arm’s length. ‘You mustn’t get so excited.’

  ‘Excited? I’m in love with you.’

  ‘I’ve made a bad mistake. Unforgivable,’ she said.

  ‘Do you mean you don’t like me?’

  ‘I like you very much. I’m very fond of you. But——’

  ‘You said you loved me. Perhaps, you said. A little.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have said that. Even if I did love you a little, it’s not safe to say such things to you. You’re so combustible.’

  ‘Perhaps you mean you don’t like my kisses,’ he said, wilfully hurting himself.

  ‘You know that’s not true,’ said Ellen. ‘If only it were, everything would be easier. But I ought never to have let you do it. I see that now.’

  ‘Then you see more than I do.’ Felix looked sulky. He spoke with an almost schoolboy rudeness.

  ‘If I hadn’t let you kiss me,’ she said, ‘that first time-’

  ‘Well? Why did you?’ he demanded.

  ‘There you are, you see!’ She made a gesture of despair. ‘My dear, why must you be so intense? I’m not the first woman you’ve kissed, am I?’

  Ashamed to say yes to that, he countered by asking: ‘Did you think I was just amusing myself?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ she said.

  The answer did not satisfy him. It set a new anxiety working in his guts. The question had been largely rhetorical, but now he seriously believed that what it had posited might be true.

  Ellen noticed his new distress. ‘How can I make you understand?’ she cried.

  But she did not herself entirely understand. And what she did understand she did not know how to tell him without hurting herself and him by doing violence to his exalted conception of her. She had wanted to be kind to him, both because it was in her nature to be kind and because she was fond of him. This was true, and it would leave her image unimpaired. But it was also true that being self-deceived she had been kinder to herself than to Felix, wantonly eager, as it now seemed, for the momentary distraction he offered from a dream that secretly consumed her, a hope she dared not hope.

  But how could this be confessed to a boy in love? Or that she had persuaded herself, against all reason, that by indulging him a little she could subdue his high passion to the measure of a romantic friendship? In face of his hurt bewilderment these things could not be said.

  Could not and perhaps need not. For when next she stole a glance at him he met the glance with a smile. With a sudden flash of common sense he had seen that he could not advance his cause by disputing with her or by looking aggrieved. And it was, after all, he fondly assured himself, a lovers’ quarrel; for whatever she might say there was no going back; they stood, he and she, in a special relationship to each other, and could never again be the mere friends they had been until two days ago. Patience, he told himself, patience. A woman, till you knew her through and through, was incalculable, full of surprises, some of them painful ones, said the voice of his new wisdom. Unlike man, woman had whims and caprices: literature was full of that lesson. Ah, but life is the true teacher, thought Felix, with a sigh of exultation in the thought tha
t at last, at last, he was living, living intensely in every nerve of his being. This girl, by her changing moods, could raise him to the highest heaven or plunge him into hell where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched. It was a majestic, an inspiring thought. He gloried in his subjection.

  He took her hand again. ‘Don’t worry. I was stupid, that’s all’

  ‘No. Not stupid.’

  ‘Stupid and clumsy,’ he insisted. ‘But I shall learn.’

  Wooing is an art, he told himself sagaciously. It comes by practice, not by nature alone. And he asked nothing better than to learn it, and to learn this lovely, enchanting, unexpected, mysterious Ellen, in all her moods and ways. He was prepared to dedicate a lifetime to the task.

  Delighted with his change of spirits she said gaily: ‘And you’re a quick learner, I expect.’

  ‘I am if I take a fancy to my teacher,’ he said, with a grin.

  They strolled along, hand in hand, companionably enough. Felix’s new tactical plan required that he should now engage the beloved in easy, amusing conversation, and so, without further alarming her, consolidate the ground already won. But he could not sustain his mood of confidence, could not still the desire of his heart. Let it rest, let it rest, he said. Wait till to-morrow. But it would not rest, and he could not wait.

  ‘Look, Ellen,’ he suddenly said. ‘I’m going to be good and patient and not hurry you. But I do love you and I do want to marry you. Don’t say no. Don’t say anything yet. Just give the idea a chance.’ He gave her a bright, forced smile. ‘Now let’s talk about something else.’

  Ellen sighed deeply. ‘No, Felix. We must talk about that. I can’t marry you. I told you so the other day. Now I must tell you why.’ She paused before saying bitterly: ‘Then perhaps you’ll believe me.’

  He faced her unhappily. ‘Well?’

  ‘I’m in love with another man.’

  ‘I see,’ said Felix. His mind held nothing but a stunned silence. ‘Am I to congratulate you?’

  ‘Please yourself, my dear. But I’m not marrying him, if that’s what you mean. He’s married already.’ Driving the point home she said: ‘He’s been married fifteen years.’

  Felix, as in a dream, heard his voice saying tonelessly: ‘He must be quite old then?’

  ‘He would seem so to you, yes.’

  The strangeness of her smile, a pride and a tenderness that were not for him, stabbled into his heart.

  ‘And he … he loves you, of course. Oh you needn’t answer. I can see he does.’ Goaded by a curiosity as pointless as it was hurtful to himself, he probed for details, careful to spare himself nothing. ‘Why doesn’t he marry you? There is such a thing as divorce.’

  ‘For a very simple reason. He’s fond of his wife.’

  ‘Fond of his wife and in love with you. What sort of a man is that?’

  ‘The best man that ever lived,’ she answered simply. ‘As it happens, I’m fond of her too. So you see …’ Her voice trailed into silence.

  ‘You know her?’ he said incredulously. ‘You … go on knowing her?’

  ‘My poor Felix!’ A note of patient exasperation crept into her voice. ‘Forgive me, but you really are very young. You’ve every right to be angry with me. I’m angry with myself, for letting you … hurt yourself. But these things really aren’t simple, as you seem to imagine. There’s no rule of thumb about them. One goes on for months, for years, seeing somebody, working together, as part of a daily routine, with no thought of falling in love. And then one day, without warning, you find it has happened, without your knowing it.’ She saw his dark, distraught face. ‘Let’s not talk about it any more. I’ve told you my secret. I couldn’t have told anybody else.’

  Felix managed a wry smile. ‘Well, that’s something. It’s something that you trust me.’

  Tears stood in her eyes, and for Felix this time. But he did not see them.

  ‘There’s a question,’ he said, ‘in my mind. If I ask it you’ll perhaps never forgive me. If I don’t ask it I shall go on wondering.’

  ‘I can guess the question, Felix,’ she said. And he wished he were not so transparent. ‘It would be wiser not to ask it, I think.’

  ‘Well, I won’t then. There’s no need to, now.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘You’ve already answered it,’ said Felix, in a harsh, breaking voice.

  § 12

  AT the first onset of Emily’s illness, the measure of authority that had been delegated to Faith until her marriage devolved naturally upon Nancy, who liked it little enough. Still less did she like the increasing burden laid on her as the illness took its painful course. Nancy, whom Faith and circumstances had conspired to ‘spoil,’ had always half-resisted domestication. In a working farmer’s household no child could grow up helpless, or could fail to acquire a readiness to lend a hand in his appointed sphere; but Nancy, perhaps because she had been made much of, or because Faith’s being always so zealously and helpfully at hand had stifled her initiative, or for other and obscurer reasons, did not like housework, as Faith appeared to do, and she tackled it, when she could not avoid it, with apathy. For cooking she had a particular distaste, whatever interest she might have had in that art being checked by initial blunders and by the way these blunders were received in a household where domestic competence was taken for granted. She had a trick of forgetting what she was about, so that the greens were done to rags and the joint burnt to a cinder; if she boiled you an egg for your tea it would turn out to be either lukewarm and still fluid, or hard-boiled to the consistency of indiarubber. The raising of eyebrows, even though accompanied by smiles and banter, confirmed her persuasion, so hurtful to vanity, that try as she might she would never come within sight of Mother’s standard or Faith’s. To go on trying would be to risk the crowning humiliation of perpetual failure: not to try was therefore the better way. Once, once only, Emily had been provoked into wondering aloud how she would manage when she had a husband and home of her own; but Nancy in her heart had already answered that question. With no mother in the background, with no anxiously loving elder sister to criticize her methods, and with a lover to please who was all her own, everything (she believed) would be different.

  Nancy at nineteen had been ripe for marriage and thought of little else. Though privately dissatisfied with her looks, she had some excuse, apart from paternal petting, for believing that the world in general thought her pretty. That she was prettier than Faith could not be gainsaid, unless, like Dan Williams, you happened to prefer a blue-eyed sanguine simplicity to the subtler enchantment of dark hair and brooding glances. In late adolescence Nancy gave much attention to her face and wasted many sighs over her hair, which was soft and plentiful but ‘straight as a yard of pump-water’. Her sister’s capture of a middle-aged schoolmaster was a surprise and a shock to her: she had always taken it for granted that while her own destiny must include a young and perhaps brilliant marriage Faith would stay at Upmarden and be the support of her mother’s declining years. Faith’s going had made her own escape more difficult: divided between envy and affection—because whatever Faith did you could not help being fond of her—she almost persuaded herself that she was being ill-used, that the simple elder sister had stolen a march on her.

  That, now, was ancient history. Weary years had passed. Unaccountably, Prince Charming had failed to turn up. For Nancy was fastidious as well as desirous. The men who came to the point with her she did not fancy, and the one she was most inclined for took alarm at her changefulness and married a less complicated girl. She was twice unofficially betrothed, and twice it came to nothing. She dreamed of braver conquests, of expensively-tailored young gentlemen in whose eyes she would seem a wild English rose ripe for transplanting into urban soil; and cherished a secret grudge against Guy, not only for his in-frequency, but for not bringing a likely specimen or two home with him when he did deign to come. And now, with Mrs Elderbrook confined to her bed, the door against escape, precariously ajar for so long, was shut
and barred and bolted. She had a father, a brother, and a sick mother on her hands, with no one but a fifteen-year-old village girl to help her with the rough work. For the first few days of it, while doing what she must, she felt merely wretched and mutinous, full of discontent with her lot. Then something happened that changed her. It transformed the situation; filled her with energy and zeal; purged her for a time of all desire except the desire to be useful.

  Dr Waterhouse, misreading her sullen looks, said kindly, dreadfully, as he left the house: ‘You mustn’t give up hope, my dear.’

  She stared in astonishment, at first not daring to understand his words.

  ‘Do you mean …?’

  The question died on her lips, and meeting his grave compassionate glance she realized, for the first time in her life, that her mother was mortal.